Xi Jinping tells judiciary and law enforcement agencies to ‘scrape away the poison’ amid investigation into missing documents for US$56 billion coal mine

Chinese President Xi Jinping has told law enforcement and judicial agencies that they must police themselves to eradicate corruption and prevent the abuse of power, as a top-level team continues to investigate the disappearance of legal documents from the country’s top court.

Speaking on Wednesday at a high-level annual meeting on political and legal affairs, Xi told officials they must “resolutely guard against slack law enforcement, miscarriage of justice, breaking the law while enforcing the law and judicial corruption”, Xinhua reported.

Law enforcement and judicial agencies must “turn the blade towards themselves, scrape the poison off their bones and resolutely eliminate the black sheep”, he said.

In the lexicon of the ruling Communist Party, China’s political and legal affairs apparatus – which includes the police, secret police, courts and prosecutors – is often referred to as the “knife handle”, while the army is known as the “gun barrel”. Both are vital to the security of the regime.

Xi’s attendance at the conference was his first since 2014, when he also vowed to eliminate corruption and weed out the “black sheep” from law enforcement agencies and the judiciary.

Under his sweeping anti-corruption campaign a slew of senior officials, including former security tsar Zhou Yongkang, former deputy police chief Li Dongsheng and former justice minister Wu Aiying have been purged from the system.

Xi’s latest warning came after the party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission last week launched a rare joint investigation with the anti-corruption watchdog into the mysterious disappearance of a series of legal documents from the Supreme People’s Court (SPC).